Wednesday, January 30, 2013

There
was an article in the New York Times a couple of days back by Kate Murphy, with
the headline “Between the Recipes, Scribbles Speak Volumes” which turned out to
be an interesting piece about the marginalia that people write in cook books.

I think this is an interesting
one. I buy more than my fair share of used
cookbooks and I really don’t mind a few annotations along the lines of “needs
more lard” but occasionally you come across a book that looks as though
somebody has actually dropped their lunch on the pages, and I find that kind of
hard to deal with. Pen and pencil marks
OK, actually smears of old food, not so much.

Kate Murphy writes, “The cutting wit of the renowned British food writer Elizabeth David
is evident in the marginalia of her cookbooks, now kept at the Guildhall Library in London.
Her scribbles are on bits of paper (grocery receipts, bus tickets, postcards,
Post-it notes) distributed throughout the texts.”

Elizabeth David was one of those people who the older she got, the
less she cared about what people thought of her, and it seems she hadn’t cared all
that much in the first place. I seem to
remember some late TV appearances when she seemed a glorious old grotesque. And obviously she didn’t hold back on her
marginalia.

According to Kate Murphy, “In her copy of The Cooking of Italy (1969) by the American food writer
Waverley Root, she wrote, ‘Waverley Root is a pitiful phony.’” Which oft was thought,
but ne'er so well expressed.

And then, “Referring to a recipe for cold
macaroni salad involving “tinned pears” in “Ulster Fare” (1945) by the Belfast
Women’s Institute Club, Ms. David wrote, “Sounds just about the most revolting
dish ever devised.”

And my first thought was that surely she must have eaten more revolting
things than that: you could construct something similar in any chain restaurant
with a salad bar.

But
then a little research made me wonder if in fact Ms. Murphy had taken some of
this info from a 2009 article by Tim Haywood in the Guardian, which in its
online version comes with a partial, and perhaps mistaken, correction, thus: “A misprint meant that anybody essaying the macaroni salad recipe at the
end of the piece below would have had even more grounds than the late Elizabeth
David to detest this dish. As a reader wrote: "Try 'peas' instead of
'pears'. Better?"

Pears or peas: revolting or not. You decide.

Incidentally, Tim Hayward is no slouch in
the cutting wit department either, he writes in that article, “Now I should be
quite clear from the outset that I've always been a little ambivalent about
David. She famously moved food writing out of the dark didactic corners of
domestic science and began to write beautifully and poetically about food as a
sensual experience, but she also in her early career wrote unashamedly for the
posh and focused attention away from British cuisine and on to Mediterranean
food. I find it hard to read her work without enjoyment but it also defines a
kind of ‘holidays-in-Provence’ middle-class elitism.”

Sunday, January 27, 2013

I posted a couple of weeks back about how sad (I might have said
dismal) some food writing is.But then
again, sometimes food writing isn’t sad at all.Sometimes it’s a hoot and a holler, and frankly if it ain’t one or the
other what’s the effin’ point?

Here is Jonathan Gold in the LA Times, describing a restaurant I’m
obviously never going to, named Cortez, in Echo Park.

“What you think about Cortez is going to
depend in large part on what you think about crowds, and noise, and screechy jazz,
about well-meaning servers who are slightly impatient with the idea of service,
and about spending most of an hour leaning up against a shoe box-narrow
windowsill waiting for a seat to open up.”

He doesn’t quite eviscerate the restaurant
in the rest of the review, but after an opening like that, who needs to?

The above photograph is by Francine Orr, evidently
taken at a quieter time, though it looks like you still have to share tables.

Friday, January 25, 2013

As Mark Twain might very easily have said, “Those
who love art and sausages should watch neither being made.”

Now, for one reason or another, these days I tend to see
both being made, and just so you know, I’m continuing with my career as a
thoroughly amateurish smokerand sausage maker.Here are some merguez I made
earlier, which of course don’t need smoking.

And the fact is, now that I’ve learned a bit more,
I realize that the smoked sausage is a potentially risky proposition. The big problem is botulism, a form of food
poisoning, actually pretty rare, but nevertheless sometimes lethal, so not a
thing to be messed with. I discover that
it was originally called sausage disease, but then the name was classed up to
botulism, because botulus is the Latin word for
sausage. Wiktionary says the word is
“Probably a borrowing from Osco-Umbrian,” which somehow makes me feel better.

Apparently the way to prevent botulism is to
use a “cure” containing sodium nitrite, some of which I’ve
now ordered. I went for Prague Powder
No. 1 – how can you beat a name like that?

Of course spoiled food is no laughing matter,
although one man who seems to have found it fairly risible, if also a medium
for profound meditations on the nature of decay and transience, was the German
artist Dieter Roth (1930 -1998), who currently has a big exhibition in New York
at Hauser and Wirth.

Back in 1970 Roth had a show at the Eugenia Butler
gallery in L.A., for which he filled some cases with cheese and left them in
the gallery to see what happened.

Well, nature being as it is, the results probably weren’t really all that surprising; except perhaps for the arrival of health inspectors. There are images around of the end result but I can hardly bear to look at them, much less post them.

Roth also made sausage art - he called it Literaturwurst - for which he took books or magazines he disapproved
of, put them through a grinder, and turned them into sausages, using actual
sausage recipes, replacing the meat with the pulped up book, and adding water
instead of fat. One book was enough for a limited edition.

The culmination of the series came in 1974
using the 20 volume complete works of Hegel, one sausage per volume, which
looked like this:

These works are sometimes, hilariously it seems
to me, referred to by po-faced art galleries as “artist’s books.” Yeah right.

I think this is great stuff, but let’s face it
these aren’t really sausages, they’re pieces of paper mache, and I don’t
suppose anyone is ever likely to eat one of them, given the auction prices of Roth's work, though it would be pretty
cool if some contemporary art provocateur did: Jake and Dinos Chapman perhaps. At least there’d be no risk of sausage disease. Might need a beer with it though.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

First, thumbing
through the ads at the back of my copy of Eatomic
Secrets - which include Prosser’s Ice Cream, Lobo Joe’s catering service
and TWA: “”The Best bill of fair in the air” - I came across this fine, hand-crafted
ad:

This is so refreshing.
Compare and contrast with “Fancy Feast Elegant Medley” which offers, “White
meat chicken Tuscany with long grain rice and garden greens in a savory
sauce.”

Archer’s say loud and clear that horsemeat is good enough for pets – and
too good some would say. Britain
currently has an attack of the vapors because they’ve found that Irish horsemeat
has been furtively slipped into some hamburgers. Personally I would go out of my way for a
horse burger, though admittedly I think people have a right to know what
they’re eating, just as I wouldn’t want my horse burger to turn out to be
buffalo.

And then, the other
other matter, speaking of cocktails of the past, I happened to watch the 1955
movie The Big Knife, starring Jack Palance, based on a play
by Clifford Odets, about the many evils of Hollywood, and a stage bound period piece
if ever there was one, with everybody doing a whole lot (really a WHOLE lot) of
acting. Rod Steiger in particular leaves
no piece of scenery unchewed.

Briefly, but
crucially, it features the divine Shelley Winters, as the careworn actress,
going by the name of Dixie Evans, who’s clearly never going make it in
Hollywood. Early in the movie she says,
“I don't care if I do see a snake. I'm sure I'd much
rather see a snake than a Hollywood producer.”

And toward the end as things
start to unravel and everyone is threatened with doom and exposure (a hit and
run accident is involved), it’s discovered that Dixie is sitting in a “bar across
from Schwab’s” ready to spill the beans that will destroy everything for
everyone. One of the hideous Hollywood
flunkies delivers the unimprovable line, “A
woman with six martinis can ruin a city.”
I’ll drink to that.